—
For most of my adult life, I measured my worth by how much I could get done. A full calendar felt like proof that I mattered; being busy felt like being important. It took stepping away from all of it, on a pilgrimage to Makkah, to show me how badly I had got that the wrong way round.
I would love to say I set off with the right intentions from the very start. In truth, I approached it the way I approach most things, as a problem to be solved. I had a browser full of tabs comparing Cheap Umrah Packages, a spreadsheet of dates and prices, and a quiet determination to get the whole thing done as efficiently as possible. It did not occur to me that a journey meant to humble a person might begin by teaching him that he is not, in fact, in control of very much at all.
Umrah is the shorter Islamic pilgrimage to Makkah, the one that can be made at almost any time of year, and for many Muslims it is a first taste of standing at the very centre of their faith. I had built it up in my head as a box to tick, a thing to have done. What I had not accounted for was how quietly it would take me apart and put me back together in a slightly better order.
The easy part and the hard part
Let me deal with the practical side first, because it matters more than you might think. The admin I had been dreading turned out to be the easy part. Sorting the Umrah Visa, the flights and a hotel near the mosque took a single evening once I stopped trying to be my own travel agent and let a specialist handle it. Operators such as Qiblatain arrange the visa, the permits and the accommodation as one package, which meant the only thing left for me to organise was myself. That, it turned out, was the real work. You can plan every last detail of a trip like this and still arrive completely unprepared for what it asks of you.
What it asks of you
What it asks of you, first, is your ego. You arrive dressed in two plain white cloths, indistinguishable from the man beside you, who might be a surgeon or a labourer, a millionaire or someone who saved for a decade to be there. Every marker of status I quietly relied on was simply gone. For a man used to being the one in charge, the one with the answers, there is something profoundly levelling about being just another person in an enormous crowd, all of us wanting the same thing and none of us more entitled to it than the next.
Then it asks for your patience. Nothing about a pilgrimage moves at the pace a busy professional would like. You wait. You are jostled. Your careful plans dissolve into the sheer press of people. And somewhere in the middle of all that waiting, a strange thing happens: you stop fighting it. I noticed, for the first time in years, that I was not reaching for my phone. I was simply where I was, doing the thing I was doing. Presence, that word we throw around and rarely practise, stopped being an idea and became something I could actually feel.
Mostly, though, it asks you to think about the kind of man you have been, and the kind you intend to be. Stripped of the usual distractions, the questions you normally outrun catch up with you. Have I been patient with my children, or merely in the same room as them? Have I been the husband, the son, the friend I keep telling myself I am? A pilgrimage does not hand you tidy answers. It simply gives you the silence in which the honest ones can finally be heard.
Coming home smaller
I came home with no photographs worth showing and nothing to unpack but a small bottle of Zamzam water and a changed sense of proportion. The work that had felt so urgent was still there, and somehow smaller. The people I had been too busy for were suddenly the whole point. I would not claim the trip made me a good man; that is a daily effort, not a certificate you earn once. But it did show me, clearly and without flattery, the distance between the man I am and the one I would like to be, and it pointed me in the right direction.
We talk a great deal, and rightly, about what it means to be a better man, about presence, humility and purpose. I spent years reading about those things. It took a journey to the other side of the world, and a few days as nobody in particular in an enormous crowd, to begin actually learning them. Whatever your faith, or none, there is something to be said for a trip whose entire purpose is to make you smaller for a while. Most of us could do with the reminder that the world does not, in fact, revolve around us.
Author bio
This article was contributed in partnership with Qiblatain, a UK-based Hajj and Umrah travel agency helping British Muslims make the journey to Makkah and Madinah.
—
